Torrents are seeded by the service until a ratio of 1:1,25 has been reached, which means that you share more than you download.

Fetch.io additionally supports file hosting websites such as Rapidshare, Filesonic or Megaupload besides torrents.

I do not want to rehash everything that has been said about Fetch.io, the Torrentfreak article and comment section covers this extensively already.

What I would like to do instead is to look at the service from a legal and business perspective.

The service is currently offering free beta accounts that give users 20 Gigabytes of storage and 40 Gigabytes of bandwidth. You can get your bandwidth reset by emailing the developers.

If you tried to use the service ever since it has been mentioned by Torrentfreak you may have noticed that it is not capable of handling the load currently. You may get error messages on various pages of the service. Some users have reported that they cannot add torrents at all at this point, others noted that while they were able to add torrents, they could not get Fetch.io to download them.

The developers mentioned that they are starting to add more server hardware to improve overall performance of the service for all beta users.

Plans are to launch a paid service after the beta phase. There will still be a free account available for users to test the service, but the storage and bandwidth will likely be reduced. The fact that both torrent and file hosting sites are supported makes the service attractive, the pricing and payment options will however determine if the service will become a success, or if it will disappear like many others before it.

While there is a market for services like this, it should be clear that only a minority of users are willing to pay for such a service. The main reason for that is that payments link their identity to the online account.

But what about legalities? I’m no lawyer, and I may be dead wrong here, but is not the service downloading and seeding those torrent files? What happens if the service seeds and downloads copyrighted media? Can the service be held accountable for that?

On the other hand, the torrents are selected by the user of the service. So who is infringing here? The user uploading the torrent, the service that is download and seeding the files, both, or none?

What’s your take on Fetch.io? Do you think that they will be around in a year?

Update: The Fetch.io website is currently not accessible. It can be that the product has been discontinued, or that the service is currently experiencing technical difficulties.

It could be however an interesting option to preview the video before downloading it completely. Maybe it does make sense for users who do not want to download the videos but view them right at the moment only.

RarPlayer combines the media player VLC with a software that can download and process video torrents. It supports the most popular video formats like avi or mov but unfortunately cannot cope with archives that contain videos. This means the video has to be available in its original format and cannot be made available as an archive.

The program achieves this by downloading the first parts of the video at the beginning so that it can start playing after a short while. It obviously depends on the number of seeders on how fast the video can be played. It can happen that it stops somewhere in the middle because it needs to buffer again.

My main point of criticism would be the lack of controls of the player itself. I was not able to rewind which is probably because of the streaming process but it becomes terribly annoying if you watch for about a minute and notice that the player stops playing and starts buffering again. It would be nice to have some kind of buffer to rewind a short time to play the video again from a certain point.

It also seems to crash quite often if you feed it with torrents that point to unsupported file types.

Currently the formats mp3 and ogg are supported and the applet is finding and playing the music files automatically. All you need is the link to the torrent containing the music and a browser that has Java enabled. It works very well if the torrent has a lot of seeders but you can run into troubles with torrents that have only a few.

The first parts of the file are prioritized during the streaming to make sure that you can listen to the music as soon as possible. I personally think that this is an interesting concept that will surely find some users who will love it. It’s probably great if you want to preview a album or song before you download it.

via torrentfreak and bitlet